2,000 barrels of frack water spilled at oil well east of Fort Collins

Feb. 14, 2013

Fracking flowback water spews from the ground at at an oil rig on Monday, Feb. 11, 2013, near 7554 County Road 74 in Windsor, Colo.

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About 2,000 barrels — 84,000 gallons — of fracking flowback water gushed from a PDC Energy oil well for 30 hours during the incident that flooded an oil and gas drilling site east of Fort Collins on Monday and Tuesday.

That’s PDC Energy’s estimate for how much fluid was spilled after a mechanical failure caused a valve to break and create a horizontal geyser of fluid that took about 20 people to control, Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission spokesman Todd Hartman said Thursday.

The broken well, Ochsner 50-441, is about 1,500 feet from the nearest home, 3 miles north of Windsor and 4 miles east of Fort Collins.

“This released material, almost all water with residual oil and some ‘frac’ additives, was contained and removed,” Hartman said. “Affected soils have also been removed and additional sampling is ongoing.”

A spokesman for PDC Energy could not be reached Thursday afternoon.

Environmentalists said the incident is significant and indicates that oil and gas development should be more tightly regulated in Colorado. Oil and gas industry experts say the incident is rare but shows how oil and gas can be developed safely.

“The takeaway from this incident: You have good reason to be worried and to be concerned,” said Mike Chiropolos of Boulder-based Western Resource Advocates. “It just reinforces the need for the state to get in front of these issues and put stronger protections in place to ensure our quality of life and health is not going to be a victim as this boom continues to expand.”

Neal Adams, an independent Houston-based oil well blowout control expert, said he’s seen this type of incident occur only once or twice in his 40-year career.

“It’s not a big deal,” he said. “No one was even in danger. If anyone was in danger, it was the people out at the rig.”

Flowback fluid, which is what comes out of the well bore hole after the well is fracked, is generally not harmful, he said.

William Fleckenstein, interim head of the Petroleum Engineering Department at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, said this incident is rare but shows that a 30-hour stream of frack water can be contained on a well pad.

But, he said, the incident “should give people a pretty good sense of what the safety issues are.”

PDC Energy has been involved in numerous spills over the years, most dramatically last June southeast of Eaton when the equivalent of about 30 barrels of crude oil was seen flowing down a dirt road leading to an oil well PDC was working on.

The spill forced the removal of 22 cubic yards of dirt and 1,380 barrels of contaminated pond water. The incident forced the U.S. military’s National Response Center to mobilize.

PDC Energy’s report on this week’s incident east of Fort Collins is due to oil and gas regulators early next week.